A magisterial, kaleidoscopic, riveting movement history of Los Angeles in the sixties.
Mike Davis is the author of several books including City of Quartz, The Monster at Our Door, Buda’s Wagon, and Planet of Slums. He is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award. Jon Wiener is Host and Producer of Start Making Sense, the Nation’s weekly podcast. He is an Emeritus Professor of US history at UC Irvine. His most recent book is How We Forgot the Cold War.
This huge and exhilarating work of history aims to restore some
depth and accuracy to how we talk about Los Angeles in the 1960s
... Davis and Wiener have created an important book to read in a
time where LA needs more than ever to be mobilized.
*Lit Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2020*
The familiar, monochromatic picture of Los Angeles in the sixties -
all Hollywood pop and Didion ennui - required a million people of
African, Asian, and Mexican ancestry to be 'edited out of utopia,'
as Mike Davis and Jon Wiener put it. What those people actually
did, alongside antiwar feminists, high school students, and others,
is the heart of this book, and it's a big heart. No one could tell
these intersecting stories better than Davis and Wiener, and their
book gives us back a great city's greatness in its movements,
edges, and other centers, so many of them forgotten.
*Rebecca Solnit, author of Recollections of My
Nonexistence*
From the Ash Grove to Aztlán, from the Valley to Vietnam, it's all
here. In showing how struggles for free health care, adequate
housing, functional schools, racial and sexual liberation, new
forms of creativity, and the human right of freedom from brutal
police violence came together into a mighty torrent, Wiener and
Davis have written a revolutionary history for an age of continuing
contradictions.
*Daniel Widener, author of Black Arts West*
The great task of Set the Night on Fire is to remedy the erasures
of the black, brown, and queer activists who put their bodies on
the line. Revolutionary artist-nuns, educator-organizers, and
free-jazz radicals are just a few of a vast cast that together
paint a stirring portrait of a visionary city ever emerging from
the shadows of the old order. Viva Los Angeles Libre!
*Rubén Martínez, author of Desert America*
This is not the theme park of mansions, beaches, and glitzed-up
noir, but the undercity of outsiders struggling to get out from
under the savage police to stake out a place in the sun. A rare and
necessary saga of unsung heroes, vicious authorities, and
unpunished crimes.
*Todd Gitlin, author of The Sixties*
This is history from below, in the very best sense. A magnificent
mural of the local sixties, written with verve and passion by two
of my favorite locals.
*Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Natural Causes*
A richly detailed portrait of a city that seethed with rebellious
energy.
*Kirkus Reviews*
Set the Night on Fire fixes on one mission - collate the stories of
emancipation struggle in '60s LA - and runs with it, using document
research to complete the job. This is the approach Davis has been
using in the twenty-first century, and it works.
*Bookforum*
An indispensable portrait of an unexplored chapter in the history
of American progressivism.
*Publishers Weekly*
Insightful and innovative...Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the
Sixties is both a fierce political and cultural history and a
geographic corrective.
*Alta*
Authoritative and impressive...Set the Night on Fire is an
essential reference to L.A.'s rich history of civil unrest, with a
hopeful undercurrent. Movements can and often do force change.
*Los Angeles Times*
A monumental history of rebellion and resistance.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
Combining comprehensive, mineshaft-deep research with unique
firsthand knowledge, [Davis and Wiener's] recounting of the radical
'60s in Los Angeles will likely not be surpassed.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties is a book as vast as the
city itself.
*CounterPunch*
Monumental...For new generations growing up in a city whose very
history is rarely acknowledged to exist, Set the Night on Fire is a
vital primer in resistance, a gift to the future from the past.
*Guardian*
These are war stories, the intended audience of which is the young
organizers of today, many of them the children and grandchildren of
his friends and heroes in the sixties.
*New Yorker*
Anyone familiar with Mike Davis's magisterial social history of Los
Angeles, City of Quartz, will know what to expect in terms of the
epic sweep and questioning tone of Set the Night on Fire. This
time, the focus is firmly on race and rebellion, but he and Wiener
also map out the myriad protest movements, countercultural voices
and campaigns that made 1960s Los Angeles an altogether more edgy
and volatile city than the state's hippy capital, San
Francisco.
*Guardian*
Davis and Wiener have crafted a book that is both encyclopedic and
prophetic, scholarly and polemical...Readers would be hard-pressed
to find better guides for a tour of leftist Los Angeles.
*America magazine*
This very readable but meticulously detailed year-by-year account
has relevance far beyond its time and place. The sixties were a
decade that shaped politics for half a century and the authors show
how different struggles were interlinked across the US.
*Morning Star*
An essential rescued history
*New York Journal of Books*
Mike Davis and Jon Wiener tell the story of a decade of
explosions.
*Jacobin*
In Set the Night on Fire, Mike Davis and Jon Wiener provide an
extensive history of L.A. that includes interviews with key players
from these movements and their own personal recollections.
*Los Angeles Daily News*
Highly readable...Davis and Wiener succeed in giving renewed
attention to the neglected voices of subjugated minorities central
to the reconstruction of society.
*LSE Review of Books*
An astonishing book that proves that people really do have the
power to force change for the better.
*Buzz Magazine*
A remarkably well-researched volume, which chronologically itemises
each and every twist and turn in the muddled patchwork of American
history
*KCW London*
An exhaustive and in-depth presentation of the wide-ranging big and
small resistance movements of [the sixties] with a sober and
insightful account of their strengths and weaknesses, including the
role that the political left played in them. Its publication in
2020 could not be more timely in these days when tens of thousands
have been demonstrating in Los Angeles and across the country and
world against police brutality and racism.
*Jacobin*
A history of the social and political struggles of the 1960s unlike
most others.
*The VVA Veteran*
Monumental...Set the Night on Fire is, above all, a historical
account of how a rainbow of insurgent social movements tried to
peel back the glitter, dismantle the police state, and replace
elite white rule and its regimes of segregation, militarism,
patriarchy, and conformity with a society oriented toward "serving
the people."
*Boston Review*
Two veteran authors allow themselves vast detail to tell us about
the cradle of counterculture, in all the far-flung rebellious
meanings of the term. It is also the story of L.A.'s contested
racial space, with contradictions ranging from radicalized white
youngsters in the suburban sprawl to Chicano Teamsters breaking
strikes.
*Rain Taxi*
Set the Night on Fire is a sort of bequeathal from one generation
of activists to another.
*Mother Jones*
Timely...We can do more than repeat the past; we can also learn
from it. That gives reason for hope and as Set the Night on Fire
makes clear, hope has always been Leviathan's great antagonist.
*Times Literary Supplement*
An invigorating and inspiring read
*Morning Star*
Set the Night on Fire is a revelatory history of Los Angeles in the
1960s, undermining pervasive media myths of the era.
*Wall Street Journal*
A page-turning survey of social movement activism in 1960s Los
Angeles...Set the Night on Fire is a serious, informative book that
is also a pleasurable, fun, and inspiring read.
*Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books*
Essential and long overdue.
*Los Angeles Times ("Best California books of 2020")*
An invigorating and inspiring read
*Morning Star*
Set the Night on Fire aims to dislodge the popular conception of
sixties radicalism as the terrain of white Berkeley hippies and New
Left agitators. Instead, Blacks, Latinos, high-school students, and
unreconstructed communists were at the center of the city's
struggles against segregation and police impunity.
*Commonweal Magazine*
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